Forty is the new 13.

That joke lies at the heart of Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s “Do You Feel Anger?” running at Marin Theatre through Sunday. In it, a well-meaning psychologist descends into a personal hellscape as she attempts to humanize a debt collection agency.

Veteran performer Sam Jackson gives it her all as Sofia, the “empathy coach” hired to imbue a gaggle of dolts with a smidgen of sensitivity. From the outset, her job is clearly a Sisyphean task. The agency’s manager, Jon (Joseph O’Malley), is a smug egotist in a yellow power tie who struts around the office with a golf club, making disparaging remarks about Sofia’s attire and questioning her purpose for being there.

He’s proud of his vainglorious ignorance, but he’s a world-class diplomat compared to his employees Jordan and Howie (Phil Wong and Max Forman-Mullin, respectively), the absolute embodiment of adolescent boys pretending to be adults. Then there’s ditzy Eva (Linda Maria Giron), a squeaky-voiced, babbling obsessive who carries around a hard-boiled egg and can’t remember the name of her recently divorced husband.

We get a snippet of the agency’s grim business with recordings of phone calls to debtors. Howie demands $700 from a distraught woman who says her husband’s in the hospital; Jordan pressures a poor soul for $48. Sofia hopes to give them some semblance of sensitivity in dealing with such circumstances. The reason she’s been hired, of course, is that the company hopes to improve its collection rate.

It’s a great premise for a production that launches down the runway, then sputters, stalls and never gets airborne.

Comedies depend on a couple of essentials: people laugh at absurdity and at situations that make them feel embarrassment or discomfort. “Do You Feel Anger?” has plenty of absurdity — even after multiple lessons, Jordan and Howie insist that “empathy” is a bird — and a surplus of workplace discomfort.

The problem is that little of it is funny.

Sofia fights the good fight only to become increasingly isolated and frustrated. Her students are as uncooperative as teenage hooligans and have no interest in learning. Their real enthusiasm is for “blowjobs without reciprocation,” repeated like a mantra throughout the show’s approximately 90 minutes.

Eventually, Sofia begins to question her own sanity and reasons for doing her work. She’s haunted by phantom phone calls from her mother (Atosa Babaoff), who appears intermittently stage left or stage right in a bathrobe with a corded phone in hand. Then there’s the inexplicable appearance of an old guy (Jesse Caldwell) in a walker, ranting that cans of dog food are bombs. This character has no relationship to the others and no relationship to the primary plot. We can only surmise that his scene was included as filler — or as a reminder of the kinds of clients that Sofia encounters in her counseling work.

The bright, happy prospect of actually helping people ends with Sofia babbling to two strange women in a public toilet, not much of a payoff for a promising setup.

The mercifully quick-moving tale takes place in the collection agency’s disheveled break room, nicely realized by set designer Randy Wong-Westbrooke. Director Becca Wolff gets wildly over-the-top performances from a talented cast, but their efforts are wasted on a terrible script.

How this project made it out of the table-read stage is a mystery. Imagine Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” meeting “Beavis and Butt-Head,” or an episode of “The Twilight Zone” colliding with “Family Guy.”

Adolescent humor may play well in short animated sitcoms, but it’s a burdensome chore in live theater. In “Do You Feel Anger?” it propels the lead character into the sewer of loneliness and self-pity. If that’s your idea of funny, this show’s for you.

Art school drama club stuff is always a tough slog. Potential ticket buyers should beware of unknown plays done without intermissions. There’s a reason why they’re presented that way.

Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and president of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact him at barry.m.willis@gmail.com.